Collaborations
Roger Cormier & Karan Andrea

The Story

Roger and Karan have worked together off and on over the last too many years for them to want to put a number to. They met when Karan was looking for a guitar teacher, although she never practiced - she only took new chords she learned and wrote songs with them. Her only real practice was in playing the songs over and over. She laughingly says she uses her guitar as a tool, and plays it like one as well. She leaves the instrumental skill to Roger, who is a talented multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter and visual artist.

They have played gigs together under Karan's band name Soul HitchHiker, and Roger's instrumental skills are all over her 2004 CD Desolation Hero - acoustic and electric guitars, Wurlitzer, lap steel, accordion, and mandolin. With Roger committed to his primary band The Feast, and teaching, they were not able to collaborate often, but when they did, it was always a musically rich experience.

Recently, they revived their collaboration to produce the song "Gasoline Cowboy" that Karan was asked to complete from a set of lyrics. She restructured the lyrics, wrote the song, and when it came time to record it, the only person who came to mind was her friend Roger Cormier. The result was a collaboration that went beyond their expectations.

They didn't have access to drums, and didn't want to use a drum machine - they agreed the song needed to have a 'real hands organic' sound to it. Instead the pair got creative with objects in the basement 'studio' yielding a unique and fitting percussion track right down to the chimes that evoke the haunting sounds of desert winds.

This inspired spirit is something that these musicians share - they don't spend much time worrying about roadblocks. They simply focus on the creative solutions that result in options they wouldn't have thought of otherwise.

This one song set the tone for more creative endeavors. Since completing "Gasoline Cowboys" they have begun writing together, recording more fleshed out versions of some of Karan's acoustic songs, and finishing some of Roger's solo recordings.